*Media Coverage - Post Lisbon Referendum -- 'Gordon Brown ready to
concede Lisbon Treaty' (London Times)*

Associated Press

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jh3jaGhXCnGzxLczEmMHEdR7GBlwD919VV000

Would-be voters support Irish veto of EU treaty

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK - 1 hour ago

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) - Political leaders across Europe were shaking
their heads in frustration this weekend at the Irish voters' veto of the
latest European Union treaty. But many of their citizens weren't.

Ordinary Spaniards, Dutch, French and Britons, who wish they could get
the same chance, might also say "no" to the cold, distant heart of Europe.

"Spaniards feel Spanish, the French feel French, and the Dutch feel
Dutch. We will never all be in the same boat," said Eduardo Herranz, a
41-year-old salesman in Madrid, Spain.

Herranz said Europeans were right to feel alienated from bureaucrats in
the EU base of Brussels, Belgium.

"You don't decide on anything, and you don't get to vote on anything
they are talking about," he said of the average voter. "In day-to-day
life, out on the street, the European Union is something very distant."

The emotional disconnect between EU commissioners and their 495 million
citizens has never been more evident than in the rejection of the Treaty
of Lisbon Thursday by voters in Ireland, long considered one of the most
pro-European voices in the 27-nation bloc.

The complex, 260-page document sought to change EU powers and
institutions to keep them in line with its rapid growth into Eastern
Europe, but like all EU documents requires unanimity to be ratified.

While all other EU members are ratifying it only through their national
governments, Ireland is constitutionally obliged to subject all EU
treaties to a popular vote. The unexpectedly strong "no" result
announced Friday effectively acts as a veto.

The EU's political establishment is already calling on all other members
to keep ratifying the treaty through their governments alone while
calculating what it will take to make Ireland vote again, only this time
"yes."

Ireland's government played along with such a maneuver in 2002, when it
staged a second referendum after narrowly rejecting a previous EU
treaty, then haggling for an appendix that emphasized Ireland's military
neutrality.

Many Europeans say this is exactly the problem with democracy
Brussels-style, where European Commission members are not directly
elected but wield continental powers.

"We're told we can vote no, that the system requires unanimity. But when
(a `no' vote) actually happens, every time, the EU tells us: You really
only have a right to vote yes," said Dublin travel agent Paul Brady, who
voted against the treaty. "You know, I love traveling through Europe,
but I don't really want to live there all the time. I'd like to stay as
close to America as Europe."

The new treaty would increase powers for the president and foreign
policy chief, prune the commission from 27 to 18 members - resulting in
only two-thirds of the countries being able to nominate one of their own
members in any given term - and trim the policy areas where a holdout
nation can block a decision.

"It's OK to belong to Europe, but I do not want to be governed by them,"
said David Richards, 56, a tourist from Lincoln, England, on vacation in
Dublin.

Richards expressed delight at Ireland's "no" vote and said he wished he
had the same opportunity in his homeland, where skepticism about all
matters EU runs particularly high. The United Kingdom is one of eight EU
members that had waited for the Irish referendum before proceeding with
their own ratification through Parliament.

Citizens across the continent complain they have no direct power to
influence EU treaties, which are produced in legalese too complex to
understand. They say it's not enough that their elected governments help
to negotiate such treaties.

Would-be voters in France and the Netherlands appear particularly
annoyed on that score. Majorities there thought they had registered
powerful statements against EU accountability by shooting down the EU's
proposed constitution in 2005.

Instead, most of the constitution's rules for reshaping EU institutions
and decision-making procedures reappeared in new packaging two years
later when all 27 governments signed the Lisbon Treaty in the Portuguese
capital.

"First they asked our opinion (on the constitution), and we said no. So
the second time they didn't ask our opinion. They said it wasn't the
same, just some little laws. But it is the same," said Han de Vries, a
parking meter attendant in Amsterdam.

"Now the Irish have said no. So in Brussels they will now look again for
a way and pass it anyhow," de Vries said.

Rachel Sayer, a French woman spending the summer working in Dublin, said
her country "would have voted no again" if given the opportunity to test
the Lisbon Treaty.

"I know we voted no to the last one, and changes were made, and our
government passed it without a revote. A lot of people didn't like
that," said Sayer, 24, sitting in Dublin's central park with friends.

An Austrian schoolteacher escorting 17 teenage students on a visit to
Ireland said her father back home in Vienna was jubilant over the Irish
"no."

"People want to stay independent and be less regulated by Brussels,"
said Marianne Findeis, 51, who added that she herself would have voted
in favor even though the Lisbon Treaty is "not really the best."

"They have to have some sort of treaty for Europe," she said.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country assumes the rotating EU
presidency next month and is saddled with keeping the Lisbon Treaty
alive, on Saturday said "this Irish hiccup" should not affect other
governments' in-house ratifications.

But Sarkozy conceded that voters throughout the bloc were liable to
shoot down the high diplomacy of EU insiders, if given the chance.

"A lot of Europeans do not understand how we are shaping Europe right
now and building Europe, and we have to take account of that. And we
have to do so very fast. We have to change our way of building Europe,"
he said, according to a translation of his French comments.

Sarkozy said the European Union "was set up to protect. And yet it
worries so many Europeans ... I take the Irish `no' as a call for us to
do things differently and do things better."

/Associated Press writers Daniel Woolls in Madrid and Toby Sterling in
Amsterdam contributed to this report./

Herald AM

http://www.herald.ie/national-news/rejection-of-the-treaty-has-made-us-better-europeans...

/

Rejection of the treaty has made us better Europeans -- not worse

/

Saturday June 14 2008

The Lisbon Treaty is dead, long live the Lisbon Treaty. We should draw
up our shopping list now for the rerun.

The old advice about "not signing anything you haven't read" has proved
its worth yet again. They asked us all to sign up to a 287-page legal
document that Commissioner Charlie McCreevy declared was unreadable.

The only surprise is that anybody is surprised by this. Now Brian Cowen
must head off to Brussels to apologise for our democratic vote.

But he knows the truth, as much as the people he is apologising to know
the truth, that most other European countries would have turned down the
Lisbon Treaty even more emphatically than we did.

We like Europe. We understand its intricacies more than most. But even
we are beginning to regard EU institutions as remote and unaccountable.

Whatever we feel about European integration in principle, we need to
have more say in what is being done in our name.

We didn't accept the Lisbon Treaty, not because we didn't understand it,
as many people are claiming today, but because we understood some bits
of it only too well.

We were uneasy that the so-called more efficient running of the Union
meant a downgrading of the power of the 23 smaller states.

We were uneasy with a treaty that required member states to boost their
"military capabilities", that made the liberalisation and privatisation
of public services a constitutional goal, that sought to concentrate
power still further in the Commission and Council, that opened up
transport and energy to enforced private competition, and that increased
the powers of the European court of justice.

Ireland's decision was taken for our own reasons. We are not Brits still
fighting the second World War, genetically programmed to oppose
everything the Germans support for their own tribal reasons.

We are not Scandinavians worried that hard-won liberal values might be
undermined, or French worried about Anglophilia.

Instead we are Irish people with a long-held suspicion about the
concentration of power in foreign hands because we know that political
autonomy and economic freedom can, indeed must, go hand in hand.

What happens next? We get to vote on it again. That was what happened to
Denmark over the Maastricht treaty in 1992, and they got opt-outs on
four policy issues.

When we sparked a previous crisis by voting against Nice in 2001, we got
to endorse it a year later with pledges on Irish neutrality. We should
draw up that shopping list now.

Alternatively, Europe's rulers will come up with another cunning plan.
That is what they did last time when France and the Netherlands dumped
the European Constitution three years ago.

The name was changed, its provisions were turned into a series of
complex amendments to existing treaties. Nobody could make head nor tail
of the finished document. Charlie McCreevy declared what we all knew.

Nobody stood in the way except the model Europeans, the Irish, the most
enthusiastic cheerleaders of the European dream that brought us from
ignominy as the third poorest country in Europe to the second richest
within a generation. They thought we were good Europeans.

We are still good Europeans. We are not bad Europeans for the naughty
thing we did on Thursday.

We might even be better Europeans because of what we did.

FMA

http://fma.ie/mediabytesall.xml

BBC

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7453825.stm

Voters in Ireland's referendum have rejected the EU's Lisbon treaty,
causing turmoil at the heart of Europe.

Mark Mardell reports.

The Sunday Times

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article4139426.ece

June 15, 2008

Gordon Brown ready to concede Lisbon treaty

The British prime minister, is privately ready to sacrifice the
Lisbon treaty rather than allow Ireland's No vote create a two-tier
Europe

Jonathan Oliver, Political Editor and Nicola Smith in Brussels

Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, is privately ready to
sacrifice the Lisbon treaty rather than allow Ireland's No vote create a
two-tier Europe.

Despite the outcome of the Irish referendum, France, Germany and senior
Brussels officials have insisted there should be no delay in
implementing the European Union blueprint.

Sources close to Downing Street, however, say that Brown would rather
the treaty collapse than see individual member states left trailing in a
two-speed Europe.

The demise of the treaty would take the heat off Brown as he faces down
renewed calls for Britain to hold its own referendum. If Europe presses
ahead without Ireland, it would set a precedent for a two-speed club,
with Britain also likely to be stuck in the second tier.

A Downing Street source said: "The legal position on this is very clear:
the treaty cannot come into force until all 27 countries have ratified it."

One senior British government official said anyone who thought the Irish
vote could be ignored was "living in cloud-cuckoo-land".

The leaders of the EU's 27 members states will meet this week in
Brussels, but Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president who takes over the
EU presidency next month, is dismissing the Irish vote as a hiccup.

"The Irish people have spoken. We must accept it," Sarkozy told a joint
news conference alongside President George Bush, who was visiting
France. "Today, 18 European states have ratified. The others must
continue to ratify - that is also the intention of Gordon Brown, who
told me so on the telephone yesterday - so that this Irish incident does
not become a crisis."

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister, went further,
stating the Lisbon treaty provisions, which include the creation of a
permanent EU president and the widespread abolition of national vetoes,
could be implemented without Ireland. "Ireland, for a period of time,
could leave the way free for the integration of the other 26 member
states," he said.

Jim Murphy, Britain's Europe minister, yesterday told BBC Radio 4's
Today programme: "Only those who previously wished to dance on the grave
of this treaty, even before the Irish referendum, are declaring it dead."

Murphy also said that it was up to the Irish government to find a
solution to the impasse. "The Irish government need to come to the
European council meeting next week to tell us how they think we should
be taking this forward, based on the sovereign decision of the Irish
people," he said.

In private, the mood among senior Whitehall officials is more
pessimistic. "No one wants to come out publicly now and say 'the treaty
is dead'," said one. "But by the end of the week, after the Brussels
summit, that could well be the case."

In Brussels, meanwhile, after the initial shock of the Irish result,
senior officials have already begun considering the complex legal
mechanisms that might still allow the stricken treaty to be implemented.

The details of any "two speed" plan have yet to be worked out, but it is
likely to involve common treaty devices such as "opt-outs" and
"protocols". One exotic idea being actively considered is a "legal
bridge" linking Ireland with the rest of the EU. Another scheme is to
link aspects of the Lisbon treaty to the "accession treaty" of Croatia
when it joins the EU in late 2009 or early 2010.

In Britain, leading Labour figures pronounced the Lisbon treaty dead and
urged Brown to halt the slide towards European integration. Jon Cruddas,
the Labour MP for Dagenham in east London, said: "Stock clearly needs to
be taken of the Irish vote. We can't just press on relentlessly with the
treaty and disrespect what the people have said."

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, stated that the Irish
vote effectively spelt the end for the treaty reforms.

"The Lisbon treaty project ended today with the decision of the Irish
voters and its ratification cannot be continued," Klaus said.

"The result is hopefully a clear message to everybody. It is a victory
of freedom and reason over artificial elitist projects and European
bureaucracy."

Klaus was the only EU leader to break ranks, as everyone else called for
member states to carry on with ratification. The Czech presidency is a
largely ceremonial post and it is highly unlikely that the Czech
government - whose country is one of eight states still to ratify the
Lisbon treaty - will in fact abandon the process, according to Brussels
insiders.

Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/06/15/do1502.xml

When Irish noes are smiling after referendum on European Union's
Lisbon Treaty

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 15/06/2008

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That sensational referendum result from Ireland called the bluff on one
of the most shameless confidence tricks in political history.

Seven years ago, Europe's leaders decided that, as the consummation of
their great "project", they would draw up a Constitution for Europe.
After extending its powers for nearly 50 years, often by subterfuge and
deception, the European Union could emerge in its true light on the
world stage, as an all-powerful, supranational government.

Under the Laeken Declaration of 2001, full of references to "democracy"
and the need to bring "Europe closer to its people", they set up a
convention which spent 18 months drafting the constitution, tightly
controlled at every point by its president, Val